Most Significant Article You Haven't Read - Resistant Bacteria

I like reading the newspaper because the format allows browsing in a way that seems to alert me to interesting news in a way that browsing the internet never does. Friday's Wall Street Journal reprinted this article from Drugs.com:

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in India Could Spread, Experts Say

A gene that helps bacteria resist nearly all antibiotics is present in bacteria in public water supplies in New Delhi, India, researchers have found.

NDM-1 now appears to be widespread in the environment and that points to the critical need for action to limit the global spread of NDM-1-producing bacteria, said Timothy Walsh, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, and colleagues.

The spread of such bacteria could surely change the world in ways both predictable and not. For example, the widespread presence of resistant bacteria will impact major surgery, which is dependent upon the ability of antibiotics to prevent infection. Will this decrease medical tourism to India? The widespread use of analgesics to relieve aches and pains has the ancillary effect of making bleeding harder to stop. Will we limit their use to help prevent infections? (Is there a connection? Maybe just for bleeding ulcers.) Will we see more "nanny state" efforts to enforce hygiene, since we know that politicians like nothing better than crises to impose new controls on people.

I believe that we should think about these issues from the perspective of those who wish to preserve freedom, as I know the forces of statism will seize the opportunity to impose controls. A companion article also points to other failings.

The pipeline of new antibiotics is essentially empty, posing acute huge dangers to health care and efforts against infectious diseases.

Some experts warn health-care provision is in danger of reverting back to a pre-antibiotic era in which hip replacements, care of preterm babies and advanced cancer treatment are no longer possible.

And why are no new drugs in the pipeline? I suspect that our very own FDA, which is getting ever more restrictive in its approval processes under Obama is partly to blame. (Ronald Balley details the way that the FDA afflicts the drug industry here.)

And also, why is this news getting so little attention? Could it be that we have become inured to scientific disaster news, because there has been so much of it? Maybe we don't trust scientists whose horrible discovery will lead to more grant money if they can hype their findings. Maybe this isn't the horrible story I thought after all. This is the unfortunate result of politicians controlling the purse strings for science.

Quick Hitters

Today's headlines and comments offer such a broad range of topics, I can hardly focus on any one in particular.

Thoughtful commenter Steve, who often challenges me and Dean asks "What alternative plan would get more people to engage in end of life planning?" in response to my objection to government incentives to have this discussion. My response, nothing. The discussion shouldn't be the subject of government incentives because it pollutes the discussion. Further, medicare needs to be fundamentally changed because the government has an incentive for people to die early. If we are going to subsidize elderly health care, then we would be better off providing them a voucher to purchase their own health insurance, to which they could add their own funds. The health insurers could offer plans that include the counseling or not and the individual patients could make the decision.

According to the New York Post, union sanitation workers deliberately slowed the clearing of city streets to protest budget cuts, and the demotion of supervisors. There are indications that the demoted supervisors were culpable. Thanks for making the case for privatization gang. If private firms were contracted to do the work, this would not have happened if proper incentives were in the contract. (A big if, but I know of many ways to put proper incentives in contracts.)

I am worried about the economic recovery. The Wall Street Journal has some contradictory indicators. First, loan activity to businesses is increasing, usually something that is a lagging indicator for economic for recovery. Contrariwise, we see home prices stalling which could presage a double dip recession. My intuition is that housing prices were never allowed to fall far enough to allow for the economy to recovery. Peter Schiff makes that case today, but a picture is often worth a thousand words:


The efforts to prop up the housing market are going to come back to bite this administration, as falling prices and loss of equity choke off recovery.

Finally, more government action to help you die more quickly, at least if you have breast cancer. The FDA is forbidding the use of Avastin in the late treatment of breast cancer, on the basis that it is not "sufficiently" effective. Sufficiently in this case means that it costs too much. When did the FDA get into the business of deciding which drugs are too expensive? Avastin is good enough to treat other forms of cancer, and the FDA has not been aggressive in the past about off label use, so why the rush now? Does Obamacare have anything to do with it? Rivkin and Foley lay out the whole sordid tale.

However, there is some good local news. Walmart collected enough signatures to put the big box ordinance on the ballot. Now the City Council is going to have reconsider their folly. I hope they will repeal the ordinance and spare us the expense of an election. Another opportunity for new council member Lorie Zapf to shine.